Mikhail Pozin

Founder @ sila, the modern burnout recovery company.

burnout is metabolic, not just mental.

Past: organic farmer, Product @ longevity, metabolic health

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

Heart surgery in September led to an emergency follow-up surgery in October.

Still in recovery. Lots to share as I rediscover my body (and my priorities)

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

"We might seek higher things, intellectual pursuits or artistic accomplishments.

Even these do not touch us in that loneliest of places, the place that longs to be filled with God."

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

"Find something in each day that you're glad to leave behind in the last week, as well as something you'd like to bring with you into the Sabbath."

- Reb Zalman, quoted in Davening: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Prayer

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

" without true prayer, on the other hand, a very deep yearning that we have goes unanswered. We try to satisfy that hunger for God in other ways.

We mistake the yearnings of soul for the cravings of body.

We feed them... But these things just inflame our appetites further."

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

"True prayer is a bursting forth of the soul to God.

What can be more natural and more human than turning to God's listening presence with our thanks and our burdens?

...

Some of our most beautiful writings can be found in the pages of prayer."

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

On Ritual:

"Ritual can seem forced and hollow to the logic mind.

"This doesn't make sense," reason complains. " What am I doing this for?"

But the limited reach of our logical minds is why ritual is so powerful. Feelings are stored and recalled through ritual.

On our wedding anniversary we might buy flowers, dress up, and go out to a candlelight dinner to re-experience something that special day when we said the words that bonded us to each other.

Similarly, ritual can play an important part in conveying and reliving spiritual experiences.

On Passover, we try to recall the original experience of liberation from slavery to the extended ritual of the Seder.

With the ritual greeting at Easter, "Christ has risen"; "Indeed, he has risen", Christians celebrate not only that Jesus rose on the third day but "He has risen in me, I've risen in Him"--now, today.

The paradoxes, the inherent contradictions, the logical demands that all religions include are a signal that our intellects are being asked to lie down so that our hearts and souls can listen."

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

Parallels between Judaism and Iain McGilchrist:

"Western society is heavily invested in intellect, lessened emotions, and very little in spirituality..

Our vocabulary of emotion is poorer, and our vocabulary, spirituality poorest of all.

Open any good newspaper and you will find an article that will get your mind going, but only much more rarely do we find a contemporary piece of writing that really touches our hearts or exalts our spirits.

It is as if our souls were waiting for us, yearning for us, in some inner courtyard, but the gate to that courtyard is guarded by a gatekeeper who rarely sleeps.

A great deal of spiritual technology that religions have developed over time is designed to help us bypass that gatekeeper. Weighing such practices logically allows our critical faculties to judge precisely those methods that are designed to circumvent those faculties."

Rab Zalman Schachter-Shalomi's "Jewish With Feeling"

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

Question for folks who regularly pray:

Have you noticed you're more aware of the different chapters of a given day?

E.g. waking, morning, afternoon, evening, winding down

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

"I want a connection. I want spiritual intimacy. We are hungry for cosmic companionship.

We want someone or something to talk to who is not our parents or partner or children or therapist or friends--who is all of these, but more."

[And we need to experience the depths of these relationships to understand their limitations and not conflate roles or expectations.]

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

"Spiritual counselors have pointed out that much of their counseling to those who are spiritually troubled deals with the ego's resistance to one's inner spirit and to God.

All world religions spent a good deal of time and genius developing ways to circumvent this quick and ever watchful faculty."

Rab Zalman's "Jewish With Feeling"

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

"Yes, God is galaxies and gluons and the great void beyond, but then we have no one to talk to."

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

"We're looking for a partner to our innermost feelings. We need finitude at times."

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

" We are deeply helpful only when we relate as persons, when we risk ourselves as persons in the relationship, when we experience the other as a person in his own right.

Only then is there a meeting at a depth that dissolves the pain of the loneliness in both.."

Carl Rogers' essay "Ellen West--And Loneliness" in "A Way of Being"

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

".. it is impossible to be accurately perceptive of another's inner world if you have formed an evaluative opinion of that person.

If you doubt this statement, choose someone you know with whom you deeply disagree and who is, in your judgment, definitely wrong or mistaken.

Now try to state that individual's views, beliefs, and feelings so accurately that he or she will agree that you have sensitively and correctly described his or her stance.

I predict that nine times out of ten you will fail, because your judgment of the person's views creeps into your description of them."

Carl Rogers' essay "Empathic: An Unappreciated Way of Being" from the book "A Way of Being"

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

"The stream of human knowledge is impartially heading toward a nonmechanical reality: the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine."

- Sir James Jeans, quoted in Carl Rogers' A Way of Being

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

KISSSSSSS

Keep it..

Simple
Sunlight
Steel
Steak
Solitude
Spirit
Sublime

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

"We haven't understood a thing about the world we'd only recently been living in, and yet we're already living in a new one."

- Svetlana Alexievich's "Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets"

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

Underrated cold plunge strategy: cold water bidets

Good moooooorning, Vietnam 💥

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

Henry Adams on Teddy Roosevelt:

"he showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter—the quality that medieval theology assigned to God—he was pure act.”

[Mikhail Pozin @ifeelsila]

996 is slacking.

The Beatles did 998.

Anything less than eight days a week? ngmi